This is a post from the Skype Bot for Fun and Profit series. This is the first part in the series and for a complete list see the original article.
Join the Skype Developer Program
A lot of necessary documentation and also software is behind a login screen at Skype Developer Program. You will need to join the program to continue and log in. This will cost you 10$. I personally don’t like the monetary fee for documentation and a SDK but I’m happy this is not 100$.
Now the biggest challenge has been conquered and you can also open up Skype’s own Getting Started Guide. That guide will go into more details with some of the next steps, so if you get stuck here be sure to check their documentation also.
Create a new project at Skype
Lets create a new project at the developer page. Navigate to My Projects submenu.There you can choose between multiple projects to create.
Right now you need to choose SkypeKit for Desktop. You can name the project something along the lines of chat-bot-demo and fill the rest of the form how ever you like (or they require). Now we have a project in place and we can move on.
Download the SDK and the Runtime
Navigate to your just created project and lets get the SDK and Runtime. SDK is the library (com.skype.*) that you will use to talk to the runtime (headless Skype client). The SDK you can download right away but for the Runtime you need to put in a request and it can take up to several hours to get the download link (usually just 5-10 minutes).
Build a sid-java-wrapper.jar file
The SDK comes in source format only, before we can continue we need to get this into a single JAR file and also install it in your local maven repository. To build it we need ANT to be installed (I presume you do). Issue the following commands now:
toomasr@cigar:~/$ cd skypekit-sdk_sdk/interfaces/skype/java/api/
toomasr@cigar:~/skypekit-sdk_sdk/interfaces/skype/java/api$ ant
Buildfile: ~/skypekit-sdk_sdk/interfaces/skype/java/api/build.xml
clean:
[delete] Deleting directory ~/skypekit-sdk_sdk/interfaces/skype/java/api/bin
compile:
[mkdir] Created dir: ~/skypekit-sdk_sdk/interfaces/skype/java/api/bin
[javac] Compiling 36 source files to ~/skypekit-sdk_sdk/interfaces/skype/java/api/bin
jar:
[jar] Building jar: ~/skypekit-sdk_sdk/interfaces/skype/java/api/sid-java-wrapper.jar
clean-build:
main:
BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 3 secondsWe have the sid-java-wrapper.jar file now in that api folder. For easier project setup we will be using maven (and probably for some of you shoot you in the foot as an added bonus). We will need to install the JAR file into our local repository. I will use com.skype as the groupId and skype-sdk as the artifactId. Issue the following command to do the same.
toomasr@cigar:~/$ cd ~/skypekit-sdk_sdk/interfaces/skype/java/api/ mvn install:install-file -Dfile=sid-java-wrapper.jar -DgroupId=com.skype -DartifactId=skype-sdk -Dversion=1.0 -Dpackaging=jar
Run the runtime
Just to check if the runtime starts lets unpack and start the binary. If everything goes successfully you should see something similar. On a Linux machine I had to download couple of different binaries before I got a client that did not die (at least on EC2).
toomasr@cigar:~/downloadss/mac-x86-skypekit-novideo_3.5.1.1041_493734/bin/mac-x86$ ./mac-x86-skypekit-novideo SkypeRuntime Copyright (C) 2003-2011 Skype Technologies S.A. SkypeRuntime Version: 3.4.1/mac-x86-skypekit-novideo_3.5.1.1041_493734 Proprietary and confidential, do not share this application.
Development keypair
Next we need a development keypair. It is a signed RSA private key that you need to request from the Skype developer website. See the screenshot.
Once you have the file downloaded lets convert it to a format that is used by the Skype SDK. This is the openssl command for this. Be smarter than me and don’t accidentally overwrite the downloaded PEM file because they let you download it only once. The keypair is valid for 60 days!
openssl pkcs8 -topk8 -in download-pair.pem -outform DER -out downloaded-pair.der -nocrypt
Create a Skype account for the bot
Go to skype.com and create an account for you bot. Also add this bot to your friend list and log in once with the bot and accept the request.
Lets sum it up
By now we should have the following in place
- Have 10USD less on you bank account
- Skype Developer account
- A project created at Skype Developer page
- Working Skype Runtime
- Skype SDK jar file
- Development Keypair in PEM and DER format
- New contact on your contact list and its username/password
If you are missing any of those or had problems getting them then check out the more in depth documentation at developer.skype.com or post a comment.
Where to go from now? Check out the next part, Getting it Running.